Larry, I'm outside of Knoxville, but I know some of the gardens near you well. Soil wise, the very large Garden that honors Ted and Mary Alice Mills in the city park in Soddy Daisy Tennessee is on a valley fill very like your soils. It's been there for at least eight years, so would be a good place to visit to see what mature specific bushes look like. More constrained is the garden at the Chattanooga ChooChoo, but it may have more recent introductions. I don't know the garden in Huntsville, but the Rose Society there are fans of modern roses. You might also be interested in the TriState Rose Society in Chattanooga. The ARS site below links to them or contacts for them on their Find Your Local Rose Society tab. Tri State is in Tenarky District; Huntsville is in with Georgia and Alabama. You do know that one person's fragrance is another's "I can't smell anything"? The best time to sniff is morning, before the heat of the day causes evaporation of some of the scent. (I think Frederick Mistral is a wonderfully scented rose, BTW) Here is a link that might be useful: American Rose Society website

Get some real butter and sugar and cream it together. That is the color of Celine Forestier. (Sometimes a little lighter, sometimes a little darker, but that pretty much is the exact color.) Now take that butter and sugar and make some cookies and sit down with warm cookies and milk and comtemplate your roses. Isn't this the best response you've gotten today? ;-) The buds start out with a pink blush on the outside as they open--made me think I'd gotten the wrong rose at first--then open into perfectly wonderful blooms. If I was strictly looking for a foliage plant, it might not be my first choice, but it's good enough for my front porch railing. The leaves are a lighter green with a matte finish. I may end up planting a clematis to grow in amongst it just for fun, but it's a really nice plant. If you look closely you might find a leaf or 2 with some blackspot, or maybe a hint of powdery mildew, and I don't spray. Sounds like it either likes your conditions or it doesn't. Maybe it's just in a sweet spot in my yard, but I've had absolutely no winter dieback, and it has the potential to become a beast. Right now it's my only noisette, but it's so nice I might try to squeeze in another.

Baronne Prevost could probably be trained on a pillar but it is fiercely prickly - the big, pointed kinds - I would not want to be the one to tie it up! We have Mme Joseph Schwarz growing in almost total shade in the Sacramento cemetery where it stays clean and blooms. I'm pretty sure it's a sport of Duchesse de Brabant since it sometimes throws pink flowers, but it performs much better. DdB gets mildew here, too, although our summer heat discourages it so the mildew is spring and fall. I heard a European speaker (don't remember who) extoll Mme Joseph Schwatz's virtues as a much superior plant to DdB, and that's been my experience too. Some teas are big. Some are huge. Mrs. Dudley Cross is in that category. Mme Antoine Mari is the closest to a moderate-sized tea that I've encountered but even that is building in our garden. Anita

'Clementina Carbonieri' is a beautiful rose: healthy, thrifty, with good foliage and sunset-colored flowers. My plants are slow growing but they also live in tough conditions; in time the plant will get big--my parent plant is about 6'x6', at a guess. I hear that the blooms fry in the heat. The flowers are usually smallish and semi-double, but if the plant is well fed and watered and gets a run of mild weather, it can produce large, double blooms, like a fluorescent version of a David Austin rose. The scent is of Tea: fresh, dry and woody. I highly recommend this rose. Melissa